Do Republicans Really Think the United States Is Not Safe?

The moon rose high over the empty desert and Miguel wrapped his tattered cloak around him to ward off the midnight chill. He crouched behind a boulder at the foot of the dark and broken mountains. He would make it this time. He would make it to that magic land where he could get a job covering the sewer commission for $11,000 a year and no benefits. He would cover AA high school football. He would type bowling scores for the newspaper in Brownsville, every night, for seven days a week. He would…No, thought Miguel, the job in the clothing factory didn't pay as well, but it was more certain to be there in six months than that job shooting pictures of dogs in the Easter parade. He turned away from America and went back home. Strange birds called from the depths of the night, but he never looked back…

By all the accounts of people who actually watched the thing, Tuesday night's gathering of Republicans in Milwaukee had all the highlights we've come to expect from this travelling comedy troupe, but this, I think, is my favorite one. Tailgunner Ted Cruz, the man with no friends, was talking about undocumented immigrants and he found a way to turn even that issue into some press-bashing.

"But I can tell you, for millions of Americans at home, watching this, it is a very personal economic issue, and I will say the politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande, or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press, then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation."

First of all, the people who own newspapers don't need undocumented workers to drive down wages. They do that quite well on their own. And, second, the crocodile tears about "bankers and lawyers" is pretty damned rich coming from a guy who married into Goldman Sachs—although, to be entirely fair, I think I'd rather have some desperate Honduran child managing my money than the crooks who stole most of the world economy in 2008.

Apparently, both the Tailgunner and Marco Rubio delivered their fantastical notions of the world with sufficient brio to be named co-winners of Tuesday night's pageant. By all accounts, Jeb (!) Bush once again seemed to have wandered in from the Petrified Forest. And Carly Fiorina attacked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as "socialism," which, apparently, now means forcing the return of money to ordinary citizens from the companies that swindled them out of it. I don't think this was what Eugene Debs had in mind, but, then again, I'm not somebody that a major corporation once paid $11 million simply to go away.

The one part I did watch was late in the proceedings, when the talk turned to the extravagant plans that most of these candidates have for "rebuilding our defenses." Fiorina seems mostly to want to put things—the Seventh Fleet, anti-missile missiles, and American soldiers—under Vladimir Putin's nose. As we discussed here in the shebeen last week, Rubio wants to re-jigger the tax code to shove money upwards, while still shoveling dough into a massive rearmament program, because our enemies are everywhere and we don't have enough submarines to keep ISIL fighters from driving their Toyota pickup trucks across the Atlantic to Maine. Here, amazingly enough, Senator Aqua Buddha stepped in with a robust helping of reality.

PAUL: Marco! Marco! How is it conservative, how is it conservative to add a trillion dollar expenditure for the federal government that you're not paying for? How is it conservative? How is it conservative to add a trillion dollars in military expenditures? You cannot be a conservative if you're going to keep promoting new programs you're not going to pay for.

RUBIO: We can't even have an economy if we're not safe. There are radical jihadists in the Middle East beheading people and crucifying Christians. The Chinese are taking over the South China Sea. Yes, I believe the world is a safer — no, I don't believe, I know — the world is a safer and better place when America is the strongest military power in the world.

To which the Tailgunner, who earlier had explained how he wants to do away with the Department of Commerce twice, which seems gratuitously violent, added,

"You think defending this nation is expensive, try not defending it."

I don't know what this means, but everybody cheered. Is there someone out there suggesting that we not defend the nation? We already spend more on defense than practically the entire rest of the world combined. Are we not safe? If we are not safe, maybe we should ask the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to look into this and (maybe) get us all our money back.

This continues to be a campaign conducted in an alternate reality. Or, as an essential movie comedy once put it:

Otto West: Apes don't read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.

Can one of these people please, for the love of god, look something up...

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